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Imam sues BBC for calling him an 'extremist who encourages religious violence'

By Abul Taher - 24 January 2015
An imam at a mosque where the (alleged) killers of soldier Lee Rigby worshipped is suing the BBC, saying it described him as an 'extremist'.

Shakeel Begg, 37, is taking legal action after presenter Andrew Neil said on the Sunday Politics Show that the imam had praised jihad as 'the greatest of deeds'.

Mr. Begg, head of the Lewisham Islamic Centre in South-East London, is demanding libel damages and that the BBC doesn't again call him an 'extremist' who 'encourages religious violence'.

According to the High Court writ, Mr. Neil interviewed Farooq Murad, then head of the Muslim Council of Britain, during the Sunday Politics Show in November 2013.

Mr. Neil said the East London Mosque in Whitechapel was 'a venue for a number of extremist speakers who espouse extremist positions'.

The presenter added: 'This year Shakeel Begg, he spoke there and hailed jihad as the greatest of deeds.'

Mr. Begg has said he cannot recall making such a speech at the East London Mosque. But in 2011 he told guests at a charity dinner elsewhere that 'jihad in the path of Allah is one of the greatest deeds a Muslim can take part in'.

Asked about that speech, he explained that by 'jihad' he had meant 'spiritual struggle'.

Mr. Begg did not deny Mr. Rigby's killers  Michael Adebolajo, 28, and Michael Adebowale, 22  attended the Lewisham Islamic Centre in the months leading up to the Woolwich attack.

But he said the Centre had issued a statement expressing 'shock and sadness'.

A Centre spokesman said: 'We and our imam work closely with various community groups, including the police.'

It's about time the Imams fought back against the slander written about them in the media. This imam was either saying that he meant spiritual Jihad to avoid being oppressed by these oppressors or he is mistaken in his belief of it if believes what he says. The scholars have already clarified what is considered as the greatest Jihad in Islam.

The assault of global capitalism is not only an economic and political assault. It is a cultural and historical assault. Global capitalism seeks to erase our stories and our histories. Its systems of mass communication, which peddle a fake intimacy with manufactured celebrities and a false sense of belonging within a mercenary consumer culture, shut out our voices, hopes and dreams. Salacious gossip about the elites and entertainers, lurid tales of violence and inane trivia replace in national discourse the actual and the real. The goal is a vast historical amnesia.

The traditions, rituals and struggles of the poor and workingmen and workingwomen are replaced with the vapid homogenization of mass culture. Life’s complexities are reduced to simplistic stereotypes. Common experiences center around what we have been fed by television and mass media. We become atomized and alienated. Solidarity and empathy are crushed. The cult of the self becomes paramount. And once the cult of the self is supreme we are captives to the corporate monolith.

As the mass media, now uniformly in the hands of large corporations, turn news into the ridiculous chronicling of pseudo-events and pseudo-controversy we become ever more invisible as individuals. Any reporting of the truth—the truth about what the powerful are doing to us and how we are struggling to endure and retain our dignity and self-respect—would fracture and divide a global population that must be molded into compliant consumers and obedient corporate subjects.This has made journalism, real journalism, subversive.

And it has made P. Sainath—who has spent more than two decades making his way from rural Indian village to rural Indian village to make sure the voices of the country’s poor are heard, recorded and honored—one of the most subversive journalists on the subcontinent. He doggedly documented the some 300,000 suicides of desperate Indian farmers—happening for the last 19 years at the rate of one every half hour—in his book “Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories From India’s Poorest Districts.” And in December, after leaving The Hindu newspaper, where he was the rural affairs editor, he created the People’s Archive of Rural India. He works for no pay. He relies on a small army of volunteers. He says his archive deals with “the everyday lives of everyday people.” And, because it is a platform for mixed media, encompassing print, still photographs, audio and film, as well as an online research library, it is a model for those who seek to tell the stories that global capitalism attempts to blot out.

“Historically, libraries and archive have been controlled by governments and by states,” he said when we met recently in Princeton, N.J., where he is teaching at Princeton University for the semester. “They have also been burned by governments, states and regimes since before the time of the library of Alexandria. Secondly, archives have been the sites of major state censorship. You classify something you don’t allow people to know. In medieval Europe and elsewhere, people resisted being documented. They didn’t want to be part of the archive. They knew that recording and measuring their assets were the first steps toward seizing those assets for the ruling class. Hence, the idea of the people’s archive that is not controlled by states, governments or other figures of authority. This is an archive people can access, people can create, people can build and authenticate. So the idea became the people’s archive.”

This is how Fox News spreads hate: How right-wing media tells lies about Islam

The media highlights extreme voices. GOP wingnuts amplify irrationality. An expert explains how the madness works

It may be hard to fathom or remember, but in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the American public responded with an increased level of acceptance and support for Muslims. President Bush—who had successfully courted the Muslim vote in 2000—went out of his way to praise American Muslims on numerous occasions in 2001 and 2002. However, the seeds were already being planted that would change that drastically over time. Within a few short years, a small handful of fringe anti-Muslim organizations—almost entirely devoid of any real knowledge or expertise, some drawing on age-old ethno-religious conflicts—managed to hijack the public discourse about Islam, first by stoking fears, grabbing attention with their emotional messaging, then by consolidating their newfound social capital, forging ties with established elite organizations, and ultimately building their own organizational and media infrastructure.

How this all happened is the subject of a fascinating new book, “Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream,” by sociologist Christopher Bail, of the University of North Carolina. The book not only lays bare the behind-the-scenes story of a momentous shift in public opinion, it employs cutting-edge computer analysis techniques applied to large archives of data to develop a new theoretical outlook, capable of making sense of the whole field of competing organizations struggling to shape public opinion, not just studying one or two the most successful ones. The result is not only a detailed account of a specific, significant, and also very pernicious example of cultural evolution, but also a case study in how to more rigorously study cultural evolution more generally in the future. In the process, it sheds considerable light on the struggles involved, and the difficulties faced by those trying to fight back against this rising tide of misdirected fear, anger and hatred.

For those perplexed by the explosive spread of anti-Mosque hysteria, or legislation to combat the non-existent threat of Sharia law, Bail’s account provides an in-depth view of how the broader cultural landscape has been reshaped in ways which make such panics possible, if not virtually inevitable. For those who want to fight back, there are no easy answers here. But there is a very fruitful starting point for beginning to ask the right sorts of questions. Salon discussed Bail’s work three years ago, following publication of his research in the American Sociological Review. Now that his book has been published, we interviewed him at length about the full scope of his work, and what it has to teach us. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Your book has a very important subject–how formerly fringe anti-Muslim organizations came to dominate the mainstream of political discourse over time, but it also has even broader implications in terms of (a) advancing a general theory of the cultural evolution in response to crises, and (b) advancing a set of tools and methods to study that evolution.

Exactly.

Could you first talk about how you came to the project, what drew you to it, and what led to the development of the theory and what it says?

I began my earlier work on immigration in Europe and I lived in Britain for a short time, and immediately became aware of the high-level politicization of the Muslim community there, and the higher levels of tension between Muslims and non-Muslims. This was shortly after the September 11 attack, and I really didn’t know much about Islam in the U.S. at the time. But when I came back I was eager to learn more. I was surprised to see how few Muslim American organizations had a high enough public profile to really help Americans understand what Islam was. And in their place I, like a lot of Americans, started clicking around on the Internet, and was pretty quickly confronted by a dense web of networks that saw Muslims, and particularly Muslim Americans, as a fifth column, secretly plotting to overthrow the United States government, in the guise of political correctness.

There just seemed—in my limited experience with Muslims in the U.S., but also my significant experience with Muslims in the UK—this just didn’t ring true. I’ve been working on some other work about the media and cultural change more broadly, and so I came to the conclusion that this is kind of a ideal case study, the social construction of an entire group of people within the media, and of course this coincided with an explosion of big data. When I first started writing this book, we didn’t even have the term “big data” yet, but we were certainly enamored of the potential these new data sources to let us look at the spread of cultural narratives, or scripts as unprecedented scale, and so I think the combination of those, my biographical experience, my pressing theoretical questions, and then the opportune coincidence of big data are really the story of how the book came together.

In the book, you talk about your theory as being both ecological and evolutionary. What do those terms mean more concretely and specifically?

I use the term “ecological” to counter the tendency for academics to focus on individual organizations, instead of vast fields of organizations. I think it’s a big problem because when you focus on one organization, particularly a successful organization, you tend to get a very myopic perspective on how that organization succeeded in creating cultural change. In fact, you only probably come to study the organization precisely because it’s created some sort of cultural change, and so you begin to confuse the characteristics of a successful organization with the causes of an organization becoming influential.

This is where I think evolutionary ways of thinking are really important. A big story in my book is the tendency for media rich [organizations] to shape a lot of outcomes outside the media. So, for example, when these anti-Muslim fringe groups develop a high profile after September 11, they use their privileged position to forge ties to other organizations, service groups, and so on. And this enables them to effectively create a sea change not only in how Islam appears in the media, but how people think about Islam outside the media. And so we see this kind of sounding board effect, where the more a rumor is repeated, in them more and more high profile and official setting, the more it becomes true.

So much of the story of the book is about the evolution of this fringe narrative, from a group of kind of hawkish neocons whose careers are mostly over, to a point where nearly every candidate in the 2008 Republican election is warning about the advance of Sharia law, and the looming threat of Islamism for the future of Western civilization. And now more recently, of course, we see the spread of this to people like Bobby Jindal, again, very high profile, very mainstream, public figures, reproducing this message of so-called “no go zones” in Paris.

So the idea is really to think about cultural change, about the tendency for media coverage of fringe groups to set in motion a chain of processes that allows them to rise to public prominence precisely because of the efforts of mainstream organizations to prevent them from doing so. So it’s sort of a story about the unintended consequences of media coverage, I suppose, to put it simply

Maybe it would help to break that story down a bit in terms what the main turning points of your story. You talk first about how the fringe first gained disproportionate attention and then how the response to them backfired, and then led to the splintering of the mainstream. Could you sketch that out a bit?

Prior to the September 11 attacks, what I call mainstream Muslim organizations, or those that produce common messages about Muslims—and these are mostly pro-Muslim messages, both before and after September 11—enjoyed pretty substantial public influence, both within the media, but also in elite political circles. So Muslims voted for Bush, 3-to-1 in the 2000 election, they enjoyed private audiences with Bush, and Cheney, and of course all this “changed,” the thing that didn’t change was people continue to produce overwhelmingly pro-Muslim messages about Islam, but the media gravitated to the small group of fringe organizations, because—I argue—because of the emotional tenor of their messages.

Sociologist and social psychologists have long recognized that during periods of crisis people tend to look for sources of information that validate their feelings, and this is both an individual level, and also in the societal level, so journalists searching to figure out the true meaning of Islam may be more likely to gravitate to towards the crazy person waving a sword rather than the rather more calm, measured, dispassionate person giving a lengthy theological explanation of the tenets of Islam.

This really has two functions: one it attracts a lot of attention, and then to get your second question, it also provoked a pretty significant response from the mainstream.

For example, one popular claim was that Muslim extremists had infiltrated the White House, the more mainstream Muslim organizations became very angry about those accusations, along with a lot of other accusations about Islam being inherently violent or so on and so forth. They shifted their style from this dispassionate discourse, trying to use technical language from the Koran to distinguish the true nature of Islam from what’s promoted by groups like Al Qaeda, and they switch to a much more angry tone. So, in other words, the amplification of the emotional fringe discourse promotes an equally emotional response in the mainstream, that had the unintended consequence of a further increase in the profile of the fringe.

This is what I call the riptide in the book. This is in keeping with the environmental metaphor I use throughout the book, of kind of flowing waters. This pulls mainstream organizations further out to sea, precisely as they struggle against the current that’s drawing them out there. This not only increases the profile of the fringe organizations, but it also begins to create internal tensions within the mainstream organizations that will ultimately lead to the breakdown of the mainstream.

For example, you may recall from the book, there is a series of debates within mainstream organizations about whether and how to engage [anti-Muslim] fringe organizations, and one side of the argument is people who say we don’t stand up to them that will leave them to define Islam to the American public because at the time at least they were dominating the public discourse about of Islam. On the other hand, there are those who realize that in engaging them, they risked increasing their profile, and moreover that Muslims should not be forced to apologize for the type of terrorist groups that they believe were not inspired by Islam. And so this creates a rift within, particularly within mainstream Muslim organizations about whether Muslims need to do more to denounce terrorism.

Now, of course, they are denouncing terrorism. I have this line from a world leader in the book; he denounces terrorism so often that he could “do it in his sleep.” But you know, the media is not covering it because he’s not doing it in an angry sensational way that causes the celebrity of the fringe. Instead the medias amplifying this angry response, which in turn feeds into this narrative of the fringe groups that Muslim organizations are not peaceful moderate organizations they proclaim themselves to be, instead they are secretly terrorist sympathizers who you don’t see condemned terrorism because they secretly condone it.

And so, by this point, the rift within the mainstream Muslim community comes to, kind of substantiate some of the claims being made by the fringe groups, the anti-Muslim fringe groups. So that’s kind of the series of events in the evolutionary process that I was talking about earlier.

After the initial phase of fringe groups gaining a bigger visibility than was warranted, either by knowledge or size, you point out that emotions alone were not enough to consolidate the shift in the cultural landscape, that other factors had to fall into place. Organizational links and fundraising are two of the things that you point to. Could you you elaborate on what you found out about those two factors and how you measured them?

The question for the fringe groups is how they move from being peripheral actors in the conversation to gaining entry to the really high-level conversations were they can really achieve influence. It happened in multiple stages. On the one hand, fringe organizations reached out in conservative circles; on the other hand, they were immediately recruited as authorities on Islam, precisely because they were the only so-called experts about Islam who were regularly featured in the media. So there’s a self-reinforcement process, where the social construction of their expertise happened partly because of their emotional charisma. But they pretty quickly forge ties to elites: conservative organizations, Republican Jewish coalitions, the American Enterprise Institute, and so on and so forth, and the question that’s interesting to a sociologist is how bonds develop and how you routinize emotions into networks.

There are sociologists and social psychologists who have produced a pretty long literature that explains how shared fears create really durable social bonds and so that’s the primary mechanism I talk about in the book for the routinization of emotions into the social networks that enable anti-Muslim fringe organizations to establish ties to elite circles, but then also to expand their own media infrastructure via movies, creating subsidiary organizations, and they really become able to create their own media spectacle, rather than depending on the media spectacle create the story.

It’s really a story about how emotions become imprinted within these relationships, but then that story of the emotional transmission of these bonds kinds of falls apart, or becomes invisible, a few years out, and these once-fringe actors are perceived as world-renowned experts about Islam. So that ability to disguise their fringe roots is critical to their success,. This is not an unconscious effort, it was something that was very carefully orchestrated.

Could you say a bit more about how you measured this process? I think that’s really something distinctive about the big data movement, and how it figured into your work.

My approach was use a combination of traditional discourse analysis and with some automated method. With a team of research assistants I collected every press release produced by what I call civil society organizations and non-state nonprofits organization that was designed to manage a shape public discourse about Islam, and these can be identified by the large text archive. You can look at hundreds of thousands of press releases, in really no time.

Then we decided we needed to develop a coding scheme, to differentiate the general ways of talking about Islam. I could go into that, if you’d like.

Yes, please do.

What we found was a reasonable way to categorize these press releases, to look at essentially five different ways you could talk about Muslims. The first is a kind of universalist approach, that just says no religion endorses terrorism, Islam is one of the world’s great religions, and it’s no more violent than any other, religion, and therefore Muslims deserve our protection, and they’re really the most tragic victim of the rise of things like Al Qaeda. So that’s a very common discourse after 9/11.

Then, kind of the other extreme is what we call the anti-Muslim discourse, it describes any discourse that suggest all Muslims have the potential to become radical extremists, so that Islam is a continuous from people who are moderate and people to those who are required to commit violence against infidels or nonbelievers. These kinds of texts say things like Islam is inherently violent religion, or Muslims all prefer to see the violent takeover of the West by Islam, given the opportunity, these types of things.

Then there’s a variety discourses in between. So, one is what I call the book a battle for the hearts and minds narrative, that’s kind of “most Muslims are good, some Muslims are bad, so we need to empower the majority against the extremist minority.” And that’s another very common discourse you see. But it’s not anti-Muslim, because it recognizes that most Muslims are not intrinsically violent and they suffer from groups like Al Qaeda. Then you see what I call a Muslim empowerment narrative. This is a somewhat rare kind of discours; it’s not only are Muslims not responsible for terrorism and not only does Islam not have anything to do with terrorism, but Islam is actually less violent than the Judeo-Christian religions against the historical record. And so these would be occasionally mostly Muslim groups, would bring up this kind of narrative.

The last one is like a blurring narrative, which is very similar to the first narrative dimension. It says we should blur the boundaries between Muslims and Muslim because we’re also similar, and we’re all in this together and against terrorists.

One of the bigger methodological innovations of the book is to modify a plagiarism detection software algorithm in order to pick up how much resonance, or coverage, influence, each press release gains within a very large sample of newspapers articles television transcripts, government documents, social media messages, that mention Muslims. And, so the neat thing about the plagiarism detection algorithm is it allows us not only to identify whether an organization achieves influence, but what type of influence they achieve. So being able to qualitatively confirm the positive influence of an organization was an important methodological advance.

You touch on some significant developments in the media and politics, which from your theory appear more as secondary effects, though they’re certainly significant in their own right. These include the spread of laws purporting to outlaw Sharia law, and the spread of activism to prevent the building of mosques, or in some cases, even just Muslim community centers. Could you talk about how these two movements fit into the larger cultural processes that you described?

First, I don’t think either of these movements would’ve occurred, or at least at such scale, absent the rise of anti-Muslim organizations within the public sphere and the sea change in public discourse about Islam. The anti-Sharia law movement in particular is really carefully orchestrated by several of the organizations I study in the book. I apply the same plagiarism detection algorithm to look at model legislation introduced by these organizations and compared to the final text that was produced in each state and I find that very high levels of influence. So it really appears these organizations had a lot of influence convincing lawmakers to propose, and in many cases pass, these laws.

The really a remarkable thing is that this narrative, that Muslims are secretly trying to advance Sharia law on the United States, gained a foothold, when there’s really just no there there. There’s no evidence of a concerted attempt by Muslims or Muslim-American organizations to create such legal changes. Even more importantly, there’s no mechanism within the U.S. Constitution for Sharia to ever supersede U.S. law. In fact, it’s only permitted in cases of individual arbitration, the U.S. company seeks damages in Saudi Arabia, and therefore agrees to have a hearings informed by sharia principles, because that’s the rule of the land in Saudi Arabia, or maybe a husband-and-wife seeking a divorce.

So, I do think that the success of that campaign depends depended on one the gravitas the newfound gravitas of these anti-Muslim organizations, and their dense political ties, but also to, relative obscurity of most mainstream organizations who might be situated to discredit those claims,. And the key issue there, by this point, once anti-Muslim organizations have achieved their high status in the public sphere they’re able to leverage that position to cast genuinely mainstream organizations as radicals.

In the book, I give the case about the Holy Land Foundation, which was a somewhat controversial case. During the trial, a document was circulated that basically listed four or five of the largest Muslim American organizations as unindicted co-conspirators to channel money to al Qaeda. This was particularly absurd because (a) there was just no evidence of any kind of extremism among these organizations, but then also because it was later determined that this list was generated by a letter or a memo that was circulated by an obscure fringe actor in the Muslim Brotherhood in which he proposed that the Muslim Brotherhood should advance a jihad against American civilization, and overturn America’s wicked ways and so on and so forth. When you talk to Muslim leaders, or again, experts in the field, you learn that this was widely viewed just as a rantings of a single individual, and yet this was held up as a strong evidence of the linkage between Muslim groups and terrorism. And so, to this day many of these groups still struggle to free themselves from accusations that they secretly endorse terrorism.

So, to answer the question about how these developments are possible, I can’t say with absolute certainty that anti-Muslim organizations created each and every mosque controversy for example.But I think one of the more powerful effects of this type of sea change in public opinion is when the manipulation that went on becomes invisible. S so Americans develop increasingly cold attitudes towards Islam, not only because they are repeatedly exposed to sensational messages about Muslims by most anti-Muslim groups, but also because there’s no counterargument that’s visible within the public sphere—apart from the image of an angry Muslim was complaining about so-called Islamophobia, or anti-Muslim attitudes. This, of course, reinforces the narrative of the anti-Muslim organizations that all these groups are secretly endorsing terrorism.

What would you say is the most surprising things you learned from your research?

I guess the surprising thing was that I was heartened to learn that America was not simply reacting in a kind of nativist way to Islam, and that there was actually a struggle, and I think there continues to be a struggle, and it’s a critically important one. The real tragedy here is not only that these ani-Muslim organizations have come to disseminate a narrative that’s really untrue, but also that Americans attitudes about Islam are starting to reverberate internationally.

Okay, to switch from surprising, what are the most important things to take away from your research, first for society as a whole, and then for the research community? For people who are trying to deepen their understanding what’s most important in either sense?

This expertise isn’t just going on in the media. In the book, we didn’t talk much about the chapter where I discuss the influence of anti-Muslim organizations on counterterrorism policy, but that is a really troubling issue. If you have people who have no credentials to study religion or the Middle East or Islam, and no language skills, and presumably little experience with Islam itself—though I can’t say with certainty, but—you wind having the blind leading the blind. Thousands of New York Police Department officers watching videos produced by anti-Muslim organizations, and these are meant to increase our capacity to recognize terrorism? Simply stating that radical Islamism is on the rise and hidden, and inside our front door? I think a much more effective approach, of course, would be to engage these mainstream organizations that have been completely marginalized, and yet are uniquely positioned to discredit the claims of extremists, and also to create a pro-U.S. message abroad, and also to prevent what little radicalism does exist in the Muslim American community.

A slightly different question: What are the most troubling problems that were left with for society – what light does your book throw on the problems that remain?

I think the biggest problem with fringe organizations in particular, they’re just really profound dilemma that the mainstream faces, not just anti-Muslim or organizations that any kind of fringe organization, which is again if you try to ignore them view risk forfeiting the conversation and if you try to engage them to increase their power to define the conversation. So I completely sympathize, in my case of course, with Muslim organizations have found themselves locked into a conversation which is not of their choosing. How you prevent the spread of this type of thing, particularly in moments of crisis when, again, emotions are so powerful and so prone to spread because of shared fear and so forth? This is really a profound dilemma.

Yes. Maybe troubling would be the wrong word, but what’s the most urgent problem that you see on the dashboard of the unsolved problems, the intellectual challenges that come out of your work?

I think really one really big one that I’m trying to currently work on is whether what happens in the public sphere—so, in the media or the policy process, even in social media texts—really translates into how individuals think. I think my book presents a nice overview of how things evolve in the public sphere and it shows suggestive evidence that what goes on in the public sphere has influence outside the public sphere. But we really haven’t yet seen how a message travels from, say, social media into someone’s deepest darkest thoughts, where they begin to contemplate things like attacking a mosque or even worse taking someone’s life, or attacking someone.

That goes to the other side of this equation too. So the battle for hearts and minds, so to speak is currently waged on social media sites, around ISIS recruiters recruiting young Muslims, both in South Asia and North Africa in Southeast Asia, but also in America. So thinking about whether and how these largely online narratives come to shape off-line behavior, I think it’s really critical. There’s a lot of evidence of recruiting, terrorist recruiting happens through these avenues.

I think this is a very big problem and it can’t be solved by a single study, it needs many studies of many different areas, with many different methods, many different types of people. But as social scientists, it’s also the $60 million question – how do you influence people? And how do you create enduring shifts that will help country like the U.S. create a counter narrative to group like ISIS. How you do that? That’s a really big question, that I plan to spend most of my career trying to solve.

How to use “parental lock” to prevent your parents from tuning in to cable news.

Cable news is bad. Fox News is the worst. It is, after all, the network that blamed a hoodie for the death of Trayvon Martin and claimed that poor people have it pretty good if they’ve got a refrigerator. We’d all probably be better off if we shut off Sean Hannity and Megyn Kelly and watched sports or nature documentaries or talked to our families. This does not have to be a hypothetical. We have the technology in our very own homes to make this dream a reality.

Abby, a Slate reader, watched her mother—who’d lived in the United States as a permanent resident for nearly 30 years—become a U.S. citizen to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. She was quite surprised, then, to find her mother becoming an increasingly attentive Fox News viewer. Abby felt she had no choice: The child unleashed the power of parental lock on her own mother.

After Abby’s mother called her cable operator to ask why the channel wasn’t working, Abby revealed that she had blocked it. The mother and daughter then had the opportunity to “have a conversation about whether it was a good news source or not.”

If you see your friends or family falling into the chasm of cable news, perhaps parental lock is right for you. Here are instructions for three major cable providers, copied from those providers’ websites.

Select Age Preferences to set up age specific content blocks or Parental Preferences to block by content rating/channel/day/time or to control adult information. Important: Blocking any rating (such as TV-14) also automatically blocks all higher (more restrictive) ratings such as TV-MA.

Responsible for spreading disinformation and his Islamophobic agenda for over a dozen years, Simmons was finally sentenced on Friday.

A man who falsely claimed for decades to be a CIA agent and worked as the FOX News “Terror Expert” has now been sentenced to 33 months in prison, according to prosecutors, as cited byReuters.

According to a U.S. District Attorney’s Office statement, Wayne Shelby Simmons of Annapolis, Maryland, was sentenced in a U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia.
“Wayne Simmons is a fraud,” U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Maryland, Dana Boente, flatly stated. “Simmons has no military or intelligence background, or any skills relevant to the positions he attained through his fraud.”

U.S. District Judge T. S. Ellis III also ordered Simmons to serve three years of supervised release, pay restitution, and to forfeit two firearms and $176,000 in criminal proceeds.

Simmons had previously listed himself as a “CIA operative,” and had appeared as a guest contributor since April 2003 under that assumed role. Reuters noted a grand jury indicted the former FOX News contributor in October for fraudulently posing as an “Outside Paramilitary Special Operations Officer” for the Central Intelligence Agency for decades — from 1973 until 2000.

According to the statement, Simmons’ jobs during that period had nothing at all to do with the CIA. This FOX News expert’s previous jobs included nightclub doorman, bookie, manager of a rent-by-the-hour hot tub business, mortgage broker and defensive back for the National Football League’s New Orleans Saints.

Simmons didn’t just fool the fools at FOX News either. The US government sought out this former doorman’s expertise as well. According to the statement, Simmons defrauded the government in 2008 when he got work as a team leader in an Army program, and again in 2010 when he was deployed to Afghanistan as an intelligence adviser.

He said he made similar false statements in a 2009 bid to get work with the State Department’s Worldwide Protective Service, according to Reuters.

Not only did Simmons dupe the government and FOX into believing he was an expert, he also managed to hide the fact that he was a two-time convicted felon, claiming the convictions were part of his CIA cover.

During an interview with Neil Cavuto last year, Simmons falsely asserted that “at least 19 paramilitary Muslim training facilities” were currently operating in the U.S. to conduct terrorist activities. Simmons credited another FOX News guest contributor, Ryan Mauro, as the source of his erroneous information. As the national security analyst at the Clarion Project, Mauro’s brand of Islamophobia falls right in line with Simmons’.

In a later interview with Cavuto, Simmons called for law enforcement to violate civil liberties and start racially profilingat American mosques. Simmons told Cavuto, “The mosques are the breeding ground. We know they are breeding grounds for terrorism, for fundraising.”

After former CIA case officer, John Kiriakou exposed the government’s torture program in 2007, Simmons justified the use oftorture on a radio show hosted by Judge Andrew Napolitano and Brian Kilmeade. After rationalizing the destruction of the 92 videotapes that recorded enhanced interrogations, Simmons refused to admit that waterboarding is torture.

During an interview with Fox & Friends, Simmons falsely accused then-Senator John Kerry of “publicly calling our soldiers/sailors/marines murderers and terrorists.” Although FOX News anchor Greg Kelly repeatedly attempted to correct Simmons and even read Kerry’s exact quote to Simmons, the phony CIA agent refused to take back his lie.

Ironically, Simmons contributed to a FOX News report in 2007 about a former FBI and CIA agent found guilty of fraud and stealing secrets. During the report, Simmons stated, “Somewhere along the line of course, Douglas, someone, whoever was responsible for the background check at the FBI really, really fell down.”

Simmons added, “This has exposed the raw nerve, if you will, of a flaw in the background check, and without a background check, without knowing who we’re hiring, and who we are employing to protect our nation, we are in big, big trouble.”

Previously convicted for a crime of violence and firearms offenses, Simmons was able to acquire a security clearance because of the incompetence behind FOX News and the federal government. Responsible for spreading disinformation and his Islamophobic agenda for over a dozen years, Simmons was finally sentenced on Friday. However, his sentence is certainly lax considering the maximum he was facing — and the damage he’s done.

One thing is certain, however, and that is the fact that FOX News and the federal government will most certainly not attempt to reverse any of said damage — as it helped them to accomplish their divisive and hateful agenda.

The Pentagon paid a UK PR firm half a billion dollars to create fake terrorist videos in Iraq in a secret propaganda campaign exposed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

PR firm Bell Pottinger, known for its array of controversial clients including the Saudi government and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s foundation, worked with the US military to create the propaganda in a secretive operation.

The firm reported to the CIA, the National Security Council and the Pentagon on the project with a mandate to portray Al-Qaeda in a negative light and track suspected sympathizers.

Both the White House and General David Petraeus, the former general who shared classified information with his mistress, signed off on the content produced by the agency.

The Bell Pottinger operation started soon after the US invasion of Iraq and was tasked with promoting the “democratic elections” for the administration before moving on to more lucrative psychological and information operations.

Former employee Martin Wells told the Bureau how he found himself working in Iraq after being hired as a video editor by Bell Pottinger. Within 48 hours, he was landing in Baghdad to edit content for secret “psychological operations” at Camp Victory.

The firm created television ads showing Al-Qaeda in a negative light as well as creating content to look as though it had come from “Arabic TV”. Crews were sent out to film bombings with low quality video. The firm would then edit it to make it look like news footage.

They would craft scripts for Arabic soap operas where characters would reject terrorism with happy consequences. The firm also created fake Al-Qaeda propaganda videos, which were then planted by the military in homes they raided.

Employees were given specific instructions to create the videos. “We need to make this style of video and we’ve got to use Al-Qaeda's footage,” Wells was told. “We need it to be 10 minutes long, and it needs to be in this file format, and we need to encode it in this manner.”

The videos were created to play on Real Player which needs an internet connection to run. The CDs were embedded with a code linking to Google Analytics which allowed the military to track IP addresses that the videos were played on.

According to Wells, the videos were picked up in Iran, Syria and the US.

US law prohibits the government from using propaganda on its population, hence the use of an outside firm to create the content.

Documents show the Pentagon paid $540 million to Bell Pottinger in contracts between 2007 and 2011, with another contract for $120 million in 2006. The firm ended its work with the Pentagon in 2011.

In 2009, it was reported that the Pentagon had hired controversial PR firm, The Rendon Group, to monitor the reporting of journalists embedded with the U.S. military, to assess whether they were giving "positive" coverage to its missions.

It was also revealed in 2005 that Washington based PR company the Lincoln Group had been placing articles in newspapers in Iraq which were secretly written by the US military. A Pentagon investigation cleared the group of any wrongdoing.

Analysts believe the British jihadi in the video may not have been James Foley's killer, although it is accepted that the journalist was murdered

The video of James Foley’s execution may have been staged, with the actual murder taking place off-camera, it has emerged.

Forensic analysis of the footage of the journalist’s death has suggested that the British jihadist in the film may have been the frontman rather than the killer.

The clip, which apparently depicts Mr Foley’s brutal beheading, has been widely seen as a propaganda coup for Islamic State militant group. [more like CIA]

But a study of the four-minute 40-second clip, carried out by an international forensic science company which has worked for police forces across Britain, suggested camera trickery and slick post-production techniques appear to have been used.

A forensic analyst told The Times that no blood can be seen, even though the knife is drawn across the neck area at least six times.

“After enhancements, the knife can be seen to be drawn across the upper neck at least six times, with no blood evidence to the point the picture fades to black,” the analysis said.

Sounds allegedly made by Foley do not appear consistent with what may be expected.

During Foley’s speech, there appears to be a blip which could indicate the journalist had to repeat a line.

One expert commissioned to examine the footage was reported as saying: “I think it has been staged. My feeling is that the execution may have happened after the camera was stopped.”

However the company, which requested anonymity, did not reach a definitive answer.

It concluded: “No one is disputing that at some point an execution occurred.”

Old Video Of Burning Cars In Paris Used To Foment Anti-Muslim Sentiment

11/28/2016
A video posted on war-enthusiast Facebook page A World At War on November 22 shows a row of cars enveloped by flames on a Parisian street, black smoke billowing up towards the adjacent apartments. The page states that the fire had been started by "Muslim migrants" the night before. But this video is actually more than a year old, and so far there has been no substantiated information about who started the blaze.

The video was posted with the caption, "Muslim Migrants Set Fire to Over 25 Cars in Paris Last Night in an Upper Class section of the city." By November 25, it had been viewed over 1.3 million times on the group's Facebook page, and also shared on Twitter by "alt-right" accounts.

A World At War describes itself as a "website strictly for those interested in military history, weapons, news, and other information pertaining to war or the military," however much of the content posted on the Facebook page has an anti-Islam and anti-migrant bent. The page has 5,739 likes.

A quick search on YouTube proves that the fire in the video didn't happen on November 21 this year - it actually broke out on the night of July 13-14, 2015. The video was shot from one of the buildings on the other side of the street and posted on YouTube on July 14.

The French national holiday Bastille Day falls on July 14 and is celebrated across France with fireworks. In large towns, celebrations have occasionally descended into violence or with fires started in public places. Although this is a dramatic example, the known facts are as follows.

Local newspaper Le Parisien reported that a group of young people aged between 14 and 16 years old set fire that July night to a rubbish bin on the avenue Marcel Doret in the 16th arrondissement of the French capital in the early hours of the morning. The fire took, and spread rapidly up the street through a row of parked cars, completely destroying 26 vehicles. When police and firemen arrived, the group of teenagers threw fireworks and projectiles at them.

It's impossible to say whether the group of young people were Muslim or from a migrant background. But the cars were not deliberately burnt -- and once again, the events took place 16 months ago.

THE PHRASE “FAKE NEWS” has exploded in usage since the election, but the term is similar to other malleable political labels such as “terrorism” and “hate speech”; because the phrase lacks any clear definition, it is essentially useless except as an instrument of propaganda and censorship. The most important fact to realize about this new term: those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.

One of the most egregious examples was the recent Washington Post article hyping a new anonymous group and its disgusting blacklist of supposedly pro-Russia news outlets – a shameful article mindlessly spread by countless journalists who love to decry Fake News, despite the Post article itself being centrally based on Fake News. (The Post this week finally added a lame editor’s note acknowledging these critiques; the Post editors absurdly claimed that they did not mean to “vouch for the validity” of the blacklist even though the article’s key claims were based on doing exactly that).

That the emails in the Wikileaks archive were doctored or faked – and thus should be disregarded – was classic Fake News, spread not by Macedonian teenagers or Kremlin operatives but by established news outlets such as MSNBC, the Atlantic and Newsweek. And, by design, this Fake News spread like wildfire all over the internet, hungrily clicked and shared by tens of thousands of people eager to believe it was true. As a result of this deliberate disinformation campaign, anyone reporting on the contents of the emails was instantly met with claims that the documents in the archive had been proven fake.

The most damaging such claim came from MSNBC’s intelligence analyst Malcolm Nance. As I documented on October 11, he tweeted what he – for some bizarre reason – labeled an “Official Warning.” It decreed: “#PodestaEmails are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries & #blackpropaganda not even professionally done.” That tweet was re-tweeted by more than 4,000 people. It was vested with added credibility by Clinton-supporting journalists like Reid and Frum (“expert to take seriously”).

All of that, in turn, led to an article in something called “The Daily News Bin” with the headline: “MSNBC intelligence expert: WikiLeaks is releasing falsified emails not really from Hillary Clinton.” This classic fake news product – citing Nance and Reid among others – was shared more than 40,000 times on Facebook alone.

Emails reveal that a popular source for mainstream Western media is a U.K.-backed propaganda outlet.

12.2016The Revolutionary Forces of Syria (RFS) media office, a major Syrian opposition media outfit and frequent source of information for Western media, is funded by the British government and is managed by Westerners operating out of Turkey, according to emails provided to AlterNet by a Middle East reporter RFS tried to recruit.

The outlet stirred controversy this November when it released a video at the height of the Mannequin Challenge, a pop culture craze in which people compete for how long they can freeze in place on video. The RFS video depicted a staged rescue by the White Helmets, the Western-funded rescue group that operates exclusively in rebel-held territory. RFS quickly removed the video and issued an apology out of apparent concern that the staged rescue could raise questions about the authenticity of other videos by the White Helmets.

Over the summer, the Middle East reporter, who asked not to be named, was contacted by an American acquaintance and former colleague about working for RFS.

“I'm currently in Istanbul, working on a media project for the HMG [the British government],” wrote the acquaintance in an email time-stamped June 23. “We're working on media surrounding the Syrian conflict, as one of their three partners.” The email included links to RFS Media’s English website and SMO Media, an Arabic website that covers the Southern Front, a Western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) group.

“[W]e’re looking for a managing editor/production manager to head up our team here in Istanbul, and I thought you'd be a great fit. I was wondering if you had any interest, or knew of anyone looking to move out to Istanbul for an opportunity," the acquaintance added.

In a followup phone conversation, the acquaintance explained to the reporter what the job would entail.

“I would have been talking to opposition people on the ground and writing news pieces based on statements from media activists who are affiliated with the armed groups in places like Aleppo,” the reporter later explained.

The salary offered for this task was an eye-popping $17,000 a month.

The reporter ultimately decided not to pursue the RFS position because he felt it would be journalistically unethical.

“The idea that I would work for the government of a country that’s intimately involved in the Syrian conflict is one that’s incomprehensible for me as a journalist,” he told AlterNet.

“This was far beyond working for state-owned media in my opinion. It was to actually be a mouthpiece for specific armed groups that are backed by a Western regime with a long history of disastrous interference in this region. That doesn’t mean I don’t have sympathy for people who are against the Syrian government. I am not pro-regime. At the same time, I am a journalist and would like to maintain my integrity at that level.”

The reporter declined to recommend others for the job, saying, “I’m not going to facilitate some dubious relationship between a reporter and what is obviously a propaganda outlet,” he said.

The reporter ultimately decided not to pursue the RFS position because he felt it would be journalistically unethical.

“The idea that I would work for the government of a country that’s intimately involved in the Syrian conflict is one that’s incomprehensible for me as a journalist,” he told AlterNet.

“This was far beyond working for state-owned media in my opinion. It was to actually be a mouthpiece for specific armed groups that are backed by a Western regime with a long history of disastrous interference in this region. That doesn’t mean I don’t have sympathy for people who are against the Syrian government. I am not pro-regime. At the same time, I am a journalist and would like to maintain my integrity at that level.”

The reporter declined to recommend others for the job, saying, “I’m not going to facilitate some dubious relationship between a reporter and what is obviously a propaganda outlet,” he said.

RFS did not respond to a request for comment.

Sanitizing the armed opposition as “moderate” has been a difficult task to be sure. While Western officials were well aware of the extremist and violently sectarian ideology that dominated the opposition early in the conflict, they deliberately chose to whitewash their atrocities in favor of weakening the Syrian government. RSF Media has stayed true to that goal, portraying armed groups as liberators and protectors adored by the people living under them, a narrative Western media outlets have enthusiastically echoed even as their own reporters were kidnapped, ransomed and even shot by Western-backed rebels.

This has presented a puzzling contradiction in Syria coverage. On the one hand, foreign reporters do not dare enter opposition areas for fear of being abducted. Yet the same media outlets that refrain from sending their reporters to opposition areas are comfortable amplifying propaganda that comes out of these areas with almost zero scrutiny, despite the fact that such information almost certainly requires the approval of the armed groups they fear may kidnap their reporters.

The warped picture of Syria that has been provided to Western media consumers is not the fault of the Syrian opposition, which is merely advancing its own most immediate public relations needs without regard for the objective truth, as combatants in war often do. It is, however, a damning indictment of a media establishment that has failed to scrutinize convenient pro-war narratives that serve their own governments’ geopolitical interests.

If you are like thousands of others, you have no doubt seen an iconic photo of Baltimore burning. The image began circulating throughout social media after a local Fox affiliate in Memphis, Tennessee apparently first ran it. Some other mainstream media outlets even shared the image, using it with headlines that said “Baltimore is Burning” and referenced a “purge”.

The only problem is it wasn’t from Baltimore.

That’s right, the image was taken from Venezuela, not Baltimore. But for those who accepted Fox’s rendition of the story uncritically, the image became burned into their minds as being a scene of devastation in Baltimore.

On April 27th, local FOX13 claimed the photo of the fires burning everything except the golden arches at McDonalds was “Baltimore In Flames.”

Reverb Nation notes that one viewer noticed the image and placed it right away. They thought the image looked familiar, and pointed out that the story on the CVS burning was not Baltimore at all.

Israel and its Zionist supporters in the West have carried out a series of false flag terror operation in the US and Europe in the name of Muslims to spread Islamophobia, says an American scholar.

British Muslims are facing an "explosion" in faith-based hate crimes, which will get much worse following the UK's exit from the European Union (EU), a survey warns.

Tell MAMA, a project which records and measures anti-Muslim incidents in the UK, said in its annual report on Monday that Islamphobic incidents in Britain increased by 326 percent last year, rising from 146 to 437 cases.

"We're living through a historical period, not only in the UK, but throughout the West and throughout the world where Muslims have been scapegoated," said Kevin Barrett, an author and political commentator in Madison, Wisconsin.

Muslims have been "made into the great civilizational enemy to replace the lost Communist ebemy of the cold war," Barrett told Press TV on Tuesday.

"This has been engineered primarily by Zionists and the major beneficiary is the 'state' of Israel, which is apparently the major actor behind the series of false flag terror events beginning with 9/11," he added.

"All of these events have either been proven to be false flags or strongly indicated as false flags and the Israelis are the prime suspects in all of this."

The Tell MAMA survey also found that British Muslim women who wear hijab are now in such grave danger that they fear to conduct "day to day activities."

The report showed that 61 percent of victims in the cases investigated by the organization were women, of whom at least 75 percent were identified as Muslim.

In one instance, a woman received a suspended jail sentence for abusing a pregnant Muslim woman on a bus in London last November, accusing her of being a supporter of Daesh (ISIL).

The Tell MAMA report added that the largest proportion of incidents involved perpetrators aged between 13 and 18, indicating a "radicalization" of teenagers and their lack of understanding for multiculturalism.

In another shocking report, the Muslim Council of Britain said that over the weekend alone, it had recorded some 100 hate crimes against Muslims and their mosques across the UK.

British newspapers have been accused of publishing a “consistent stream” of inaccurate stories about Muslims, after national titles were forced to make corrections over inaccurate reporting more than 20 times in recent months.

Miqdaad Versi, assistant general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, has been seeking corrections for inaccurate reporting since last November.

So far he has secured almost 20 corrections and retractions and a further 20 complaints are being examined by the press regulator Ipso.

Mr Versi said he has flagged up five inaccurate reports by The Sun, three by the Express and three by the Mail Online.

Inaccurate reporting has caused a "rising hostility towards Muslims" in Britain, he said.

"This has real-life consequences as far-right extremists share such false stories, leading to rising hostility towards Muslims," he told The Independent.

There have been a number of corrections made in recent months as a result of complaints made by Mr Versi and others. Enclaves of Islam see UK as 75% Muslim

Among them was a December report in the The Sunday Times which stated that "enclaves of Islam see UK as 75% Muslim". The story was also picked up by The Sun, the Daily Express and the Mail on Sunday.

It was based on a report by government integration tsar Dame Louise Casey, which claimed thousands of Muslims in the UK were so cut off from mainstream society that they estimated the country's Muslim population to be 10 times larger than it was.

However, it later transpired the survey cited was based on respondents in one school, and that they were asked about Asians, not Muslims.
The headline in The Sunday Times was subsequently changed to "Britain is 50-90% Asian, say schoolchildren".

The full correction read: "We reported in ‘Enclaves of Islam see UK as 75% Muslim’ that the Casey review of integration would say that some segregated Muslims believe Britain is 75% Islamic."

'One in five Brit Muslims sympathy for jihadis'

In November 2015, following the Paris attacks, The Sun's front page carried the results of a “shock poll” which claimed one in five British Muslims sympathised with Isis.

It later emerged that the question in the poll only asked if Muslims sympathised with those who travelled to “join fighters in Syria”, and did not specify Isis.

The Sun was subsequently ordered to admit the story was “significantly misleading”.

‘Islamic’ Honour Killing

The Sun also landed itself in hot water when an article described the murder of a 34-year-old Muslim woman in Luton as an “Islamic honour attack”.

This prompted a complaint that it incorrectly asserted honour-killings have a basis in Islam.

Police had said they were investigating the possibility she was killed in “honour-based violence”, but were keeping an open mind over the motive.

Following an Ipso investigation into the matter, the newspaper offered a clarification, stating: “We are happy to make clear Islam as a religion does no support so-called ‘honour killings'.”

Mr Versi, who plans to continue seeking corrections from the press about inaccuracies about Muslims, said the scale of the issue is being “massively underestimated”.

“Journalism plays a vital role in our democracy and the brilliant work by many journalists is being tarred by this consistent stream of negative and inaccurate reporting about Muslims,“ he told The Independent.

“Newspaper editors need to seriously consider whether such a large number of inaccuracies on this one issue, is in line with the basic standards of professional standards that they claim to adhere to, or whether it is indicative of the prioritisation of click-baiting over accuracy in the case of serial offenders."

He added: "It is worth noting that this huge number of corrections that have been forced, mainly due to complaints by me, seems to be a massive underestimate of the scale of the issue, given that the majority have taken place within the last one to two months when I have been monitoring closely.”

The Canadian government has officially stepped in to stop the spread of poisonous lies from conservative propaganda factory Fox News. After the recent terrorist attack at a mosque in Quebec, Fox News published a tweet announcing that the suspect was of Moroccan origin.

The initial tweet was disingenuous – two men were arrested and deemed suspects while only one was of Moroccan origin. When the man of Moroccan origin was deemed a witness, not a suspect, Fox published another tweet saying that one man had been released and another was still held as a suspect. They made no mention that the man of Moroccan origin was released and neglected to mention that the remaining suspect was French Canadian.

Kate Purchase, the Director of Communications for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office, has publicly shamed Fox News for their deceptive, race-baiting reporting tactics. She published the following statement on Twitter:

Fox News finally deleted their tweet blaming the man of Moroccan origin who did nothing wrong, admitting that they had misled the public. America under the new Donald Trump Administration is too corrupt to stand up to Fox News’s ingrained love of marginalizing and demonizing minorities, so Canada is forced to do it for us.

That being said, we commend Prime Minister Trudeau and his staff for refusing to let minority members of their community be vilified, even in countries beyond Canada’s borders. It is just unfortunate that it apparently takes a tremendous amount of uproar to convince Fox News to (at least in public) respect the right to existence of minorities in the Wes

Except now she doesn't appear to have misspoken at all; she seems to have believed that the Bowling Green massacre was a real thing.

How do we know? Because she cited the same nonexistent attack in separate interviews with two other outlets — Cosmopolitan magazine and TMZ.

While discussing why former president Barack Obama halted refugees from Iraq in 2011, Conway explained to Cosmo on Jan. 29: “He did that because two Iraqi nationals came to this country, joined ISIS, traveled back to the Middle East to get trained and refine their terrorism skills and come back here, and were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre of taking innocent soldiers' lives away.”

“He did that because, I assume, there were two Iraqis who came here, got radicalized, joined ISIS, and then were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green attack on our brave soldiers,” she said.

Conway's version of events here is a mess. The FBI has said the two men “admitted using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) against U.S. soldiers in Iraq and … attempted to send weapons and money to al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) for the purpose of killing U.S. soldiers.” The FBI did not say the two men traveled back to the Middle East to train for an attack. And there was no attack on U.S. soil.

Conway's initial quote last week about Bowling Green — with MSNBC's Chris Matthews — was that the Iraqis were the “masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre.” And it seemed plausible that she meant the men were the “masterminds” of the actual plot, which was to send weapons to al-Qaeda in Iraq.

But “masterminds” is also a word that generally connotes a complex terrorist act. And now we have these new quotes showing Conway believed this “Bowling Green massacre” involved overseas training and “taking innocent soldiers' lives away” in Bowling Green, Ky.

Trump supporters will dismiss this as quibbling, given that the men did target U.S. soldiers in Iraq. But Trump's travel ban is aimed at preventing domestic terrorism, of which Bowling Green isn't an example. Yet Conway cited it three times as justification and seemed to believe a massacre occurred there.

And it all goes back to a point I made last week about what this says about the White House's messaging operation. A week after Trump's travel ban was instituted, Conway still didn't seem to have her talking points down:
Perhaps it could be excused as a slip of the tongue. But in context, it's just more evidence of a White House messaging operation that doesn't have its shoes on the right feet. Time and again in the last two weeks, Trump's top messengers have gotten their facts wrong, mixed their messages and struggled to defend their boss. There simply doesn't seem to be any plan.
Add this one to the list.

Update: Relatedly, CNN's “State of the Union” now says it declined Conway as a guest for Sunday's show. It didn't say why, but the New York Times' Jim Rutenberg says CNN told him it had “serious questions about her credibility,” and some media watchdogs have been calling on cable news to stop booking Conway for that same reason.

Conway had said she was not available for the Sunday show, but CNN disputes that.

President Donald Trump's efforts to find any kind of support for his unconstitutional Muslim "travel" ban apparently include dabbling in the "fake news" he complains about so often. Except unlike the New York Times and CNN, Trump is actually peddling Islamophobic conspiracy theories and lies to his followers.

On Thursday, Trump posted a link to a Jordanian click-bait agitprop websitethat said that the Middle Eastern nation of Kuwait had also issued a "Trump-esque" visa ban to five Muslim-majority nations. "Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians, Pakistanis and Afghans will not be able to obtain visit, tourism or trade Kuwaiti visas with the news coming one day after the US slapped its own restrictions on seven Muslim-majority countries" reads the article. It was shared more than 70,000 times by Trump fans and was subsequently picked up by far-right propaganda outlets like Breibart, Infowars, and Russian state-run Sputnik. Only Sputnik has bothered to post a retraction, as noted by Buzzfeed.

Of course, the accusation is absolutely ridiculous, considering that Kuwait itself is an overwhelmingly Muslim nation. That much was made clear when the Kuwaiti government issued an angry statement debunking the story and sent extremely thinly veiled criticisms at Trump for his discriminatory ban.

Foreign Minister Sabah Al Khalid Al Sabah issued this statement in response to Trump's fake news: "Kuwait categorically denies these claims and affirms that these reported nationalities...have big communities in Kuwait and enjoy full rights. The State of Kuwait believes that granting of visa [sic] is a sovereign matter, and is not linked to terrorism or violence or nationality or faith."

The story appears to have originated in a 2011 story on Gulf News.com, which gives no sources and was never confirmed by any official sources.

It just goes to show how easily disinformation spreads and how easy it is for the far-right wing to insert their foul, pernicious narratives into public discourse. One post, one click, and suddenly hundreds of thousands of people are reading and sharing a story that is obviously fake to anyone with the most basic knowledge about the Middle East.

It is extremely disturbing to see the President of the United States sharing completely fabricated news, which not only highlights just how willfully ignorant he truly is but how quick he is to jump at anything that supports his twisted and perverse worldview.

Jay Syrmopoulos, of The Free Thought Project, interviewed investigative reporter Abby Martin, the former host of the RT show Breaking the Set, which was featured in the fatally flawed DNI report on Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election, and asked her a few questions about the widely panned intelligence report, fake news and more.

The “Declassified Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections” report, which amounted to nothing more than a speculative assessment, contained no actual evidence of Russian hacking, and was a clear attempt at propping up a dubious political agenda.

The report provided no conclusive evidence to support the oft-made claims of “Russia hacking the election,” and instead devoted a large section of the report to speculative claims about Russian motives and criticism of the Russian television station RT.

In particular, the report explicitly blamed the RT program, Breaking the Set, for undermining Americans’ confidence in US electoral processes. One major problem: the program wasn’t even on the air during the current presidential election cycle.